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PARIS 2011:
The Remote Viewing Conference
CONSCIOUS REALISM
and the Mind-Body Problem
THE GOLD LEAF LADY
MY PEAR EXPERIMENT
MEETINGS WITH THE MATRIX:
The Supermind of Creation
APERTURE
Spring/Summer 2011
APERTURE
Ap - er - ture (aper-cher) n. 1. A
hole, cleft, gap, or space through
which something, such as light,
may pass. 2. A term of art in certain
remote-viewing methodologies,
signifying the point or portal through
which information transitions from
the subconscious into conscious
awareness.
Aperture is a publication of the
International Remote Viewing
Association (IRVA). It is distributed
to persons and institutions holding
membership in the Association.
Print copies are available from
irva.magcloud.com. For further
information, email contact@irva.org.
EDITORIAL TEAM:
John P. Stahler
Cheryle L. Hopton
William P. Eigles
OFFICERS:
President: John P. Stahler
Vice President: Cheryle L.
Hopton
Treasurer: Sandra Ray
Secretary: Jason Becera
DIRECTORS:
Leonard (Lyn) Buchanan
William F. Higgins
Cheryle L. Hopton
Stephan A. Schwartz
Paul H. Smith, Ph.D.
John P. Stahler
Russell Targ
Jessica Utts, Ph.D.
ADVISORS:
H. E. Puthoff, Ph.D.
David Hathcock
IRVA is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit
organization devoted to the
encouragement of research,
education, and public information
in the field of remote viewing.
Letters and contributions to Aperture
are invited. Please address them
to the Editor at contact@irva.org.
Submission of material does not
guarantee its publication.
2011 The International Remote
Viewing Association.
Contents
1 FEATURE ARTICLE
13 REVIEW
The Gold Leaf Lady
15 RV RESEARCH
My PEAR Experiment
by William F. Higgins
21 IRVA NEWS
FORENSIC Remote Viewing:
The Mackenzie Cowell
Murder Case
by Debra Duggan-Takagi and
Dick Allgire
3 CONFERENCE
HIGHLIGHTS
PARIS 2011
by Paul H. Smith, Ph.D.
27 APERTURE
Aperture: Now Available
Online!
28 ABOUT IRVA
11 CONSCIOUSNESS
RESEARCH
Conscious Realism and the
Mind-Body Problem
by Donald D. Hoffman, Ph.D.
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Web Guide
Hawaii Remote Viewers Guild
www.hrvg.org
www.iris-ic.com
www.cogsci.uci.edu/~ddhoff/
http://userpages.umbc.edu/~braude/
PEAR Lab
www.princeton.edu/~pear/experiments
James Channon
www.firstearthbattalion.com
IRVA Website
www.irva.org
IRVA Facebook
facebook.irva.org
IRVA Twitter
twitter.irva.org
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FEATURE ARTICLE
vigorously investigating the case. She asked DugganTakagi if HRVG would be willing to provide additional
information about the event.
Duggan-Takagi prepared a target, and HRVG viewers were given the target identifier M4C9-W1W7. This
is an alphanumeric code assigned to the target. Viewers
were also given a series of encrypted location sub-cues
as numbers a technique employed by HRVG known
as S-7 Annex A. No description of events or places
was provided.
Unknown to the viewers, the S-7 Annex A numbers
represented locations in and around the Wenatchee
area. The viewers were tasked with finding the location
of the killer from the following encrypted number references (the text that follows was not provided):
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Spring/Summer 2011
Target ID
Mackenzie Cowell Murder
Describe events leading up to and the person who
committed her murder.
M4C9-W1W7
704
314
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HRVG Project Remote Viewers
Dick Allgire, David Barnes, Jason Becera, Debra Duggan-Takagi, Anne Koide, Coen Naninck, Maria Carmen
Naulty, Sita Seery, Michelle Tulsa, Glenn Wheaton.
The full sessions, complete data-extraction matrix,
and analysis can be found on the HRVG website at
www.hrvg.org/article_style2.php?getarticleid=144
___________________________________________
Debra Duggan-Takagi is treasurer of the Hawaii Remote Viewers Guild, an operational
remote viewer, online HRVG trainer,
project manager, and analyst who has
trained at HRVG in Honolulu for more
than nine years. Debra is a skilled genealogist and certified Healing Touch
Practitioner who has lived in Hawaii
for over 30 years.
Dick Allgire, vice president of the Hawaii Remote
Viewers Guild, is a skilled remote
viewer and HRVG-certified instructor
who trained under Glenn Wheaton in
Honolulu for over ten years. Dick has
lectured and trained students internationally at scientific symposia. A veteran television journalist with over 26
years experience as a reporter, anchor, and producer,
he has worked in Hawaii since 1985.
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CONFERENCE HIGHLIGHTS
PARIS 2011
translated simultaneously by a team of talented interpreters), Tournier presented one of the most thoughtful
discussions of how natural psychics can profit from
remote-viewing lessons learned. One point well taken
was that people often patronize a psychic reader not
so much because they really want to hear about their
futures but because they are hoping to hear something
comforting. However, if any psychic (or remote viewer)
only tells the customer (or client) what she or he wants
to hear, that psychic has failed to do the right job.
Tournier was followed by Dominique Surel, Ph.D.
A student of IRVA Board member and remote-viewing
trainer Lyn Buchanan, and the conference organizer for
the Society for Scientific Exploration, Surel discussed
Controlled Remote Viewing (CRV), outlining her ideas
about how learning the methodology affects ones
consciousness and noting that merely having an intellectual understanding of it is no substitute for the real
experience. She also addressed brain plasticity -- as
we develop new skills and abilities, our brains physically
rewire themselves to a higher level of functionality. She
then considered quantum nonlocal principles and the
holographic model of reality in terms of a time/space/
event matrix. Surel rounded out her presentation with a
survey of CRVs transformative effects on her students
and associates.
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CONSCIOUSNESS RESEARCH
Conscious Realism
and the Mind-Body Problem
Editors Note: This is part 2 of a 2-part paper written
by Donald D. Hoffman, Ph.D., Department of Cognitive
Science, University of California at Irvine, USA. Part
1 of this article appeared in the Fall/Winter 2011 issue
of Aperture.
Reprint: Mind & Matter
Vol. 6(1), pp. 87121
2008 Imprint Academic
Almost without exception, the authors of these
perceptual theories are physicalists who accept HFD
[hypothesis of faithful depiction] and conceive of their
theories as specifying methods by which human
observers can reconstruct or approximate the true
properties of physical objects that, they assume, exist objectively, i.e., independently of the observer (a
claim about physical objects that is explicitly denied
by conscious realism). But each of these perceptual
theories can equally well be reinterpreted simply as
specifying a method of object construction, not reconstruction. The mathematics is indifferent between the
two interpretations. It does not require the hypothesis
of independently existing physical objects. It is perfectly
compatible with the hypothesis of conscious realism,
and the mind-dependence of all objects.
So interpreted, the large and growing literature in
computational vision, and computational perception
more generally, is concrete scientific progress on
the mind-body problem, as this problem is posed by
conscious realism. It gives mathematically precise
theories about how certain conscious agents construct their physical worlds. The relationship between
the conscious and the physical is thus not a mystery
but the subject of systematic scientific investigation
and genuine scientific theories. What one gives up in
this framework of thinking is the belief that physical
objects and their properties exist independently of the
conscious agents that perceive them. Piaget claimed
that children, at about nine months of age, acquire
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This is a radical claim and close to an outright reductio of the position. Reductive functionalists, by contrast,
do not endorse epiphenomenalism, since they claim
that conscious experiences are identical to certain
functional states of the brain, and conscious experiences therefore possess the causal properties of those
functional states. However, reductive functionalism
has recently been disproved by the scrambling theorem, which shows that, if one grants that conscious
experiences can be represented mathematically, then
conscious experiences and functional relations are not
numerically identical (Hoffman 2006).
Conscious realism leads to a different view of
causality, a view I call epiphysicalism: Conscious
agents are the only locus of causality, and such agents
construct physical objects as elements of their MUIs
[multimodal user interfaces]; but physical objects have
no causal interactions among themselves, or any
other causal powers. Physical objects, as icons of a
conscious agents MUI, can inform, but do not cause,
the choices and actions of a conscious agent. When
a cue ball hits an eight ball and sends it careening to
the corner pocket, the cue ball does not cause the
movement of the eight ball any more than the movement of a file icon to the recycle bin causes the bin
to open or a file to be deleted. A useful user interface
offers, as discussed above, concealed causality and
ostensible objectivity. It allows one to act, in all but the
most sophisticated situations, as if the icons had causal
powers, and in complete ignorance of the true causal
chains. The perceptual conclusions of one conscious
observer might be among the premises of a second
conscious observer and, thereby, inform but not cause
the perceptions of the second (Bennett et al. 1989).
Attractors in the asymptotic stochastic behavior of a
system of conscious agents might be among the premises of other conscious agents and thereby inform, but
not cause, their behavior (Bennett et al. 1989).
So, in particular, epiphysicalism entails that the brain
has no causal powers. The brain does not cause conscious experience; instead, certain conscious agents,
when so triggered by interactions with certain other
systems of conscious agents, construct brains (and the
rest of human anatomy) as complex icons of their MUIs.
The neural correlates of consciousness are many and
systematic not because brains cause consciousness,
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REVIEW
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Dr. Jacques Valle, with Will and Daryl Smith, Paris, France.
___________________________________________
Angela Thompson Smith, Ph.D., is a long-time practitioner, researcher, and instructor of
remote viewing and other paranormal
abilities. She is the author of several
books, the first of which is Remote
Perceptions (1998). Angela is an
IRVA founding Board member, and
president of Mindwise Consulting.
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RV RESEARCH
My PEAR Experiment
by William F. Higgins
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Conscious Realism and the Mind-Body Problem, continued from page 14
plified version of it is created by my super-user interface. If I meet another conscious agent, we both see
each other and we both interact together. However,
the other conscious agent should be equally inaccessible to me, like the noumenic object. How do we get
outside of our epistemic jail, the super-user interface?
To answer this, consider what you see when you
look into a mirror. All you see is skin, hair, eyes, lips.
But as you stand there, looking at yourself, you know
firsthand that the face you see in the mirror shows little
of who you really are. It does not show your hopes,
fears, beliefs, or desires. It does not show your consciousness. It does not show that you are suffering
a migraine or savoring a melody. All you see, and all
that the user interfaces of others can see, is literally
skin-deep. Other people see a face, not the conscious
agent that is your deeper reality. They can, of course,
infer properties of you as a conscious agent from your
facial expressions and your words -- a smile and a
laugh suggest certain conscious states, a frown and a
cry others. Such inferences are the way we avoid an
epistemic jail, but all such inferences are unavoidably
fallible. When we look at a rock, rather than a face, we
get much less information about the conscious agents
that triggered us to construct the rock; this is no surprise. The universe is complex, perhaps infinitely so.
Thus, our user interfaces, with their endogenous limits,
necessarily give us less insight into some interactions
with that universe, and more into others. When we look
at ourselves in the mirror, we see firsthand the limitations of our user interface and the presence, behind
that interface, of a conscious agent.
8. Evolution
One major objection to conscious realism invokes
evolution. We now know, the argument goes, that the
universe existed for billions of years before the first
forms of life, and probably many millions more before
the first flickers of consciousness. Natural selection,
and other evolutionary processes first described by
Darwin, then shaped life and consciousness into
endless forms, most beautiful and most wonderful.
This contradicts the claim of conscious realism, viz.,
that consciousness is fundamental and that matter is
simply a property of certain icons of conscious agents.
There are four responses to this objection. First,
although it is true that evolutionary theory has been
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world that is objective, in the sense that it is observerindependent. It is the latter interpretation that is probably intended by the objection. If so, then MUI theory
does not claim there is no access to the real world,
but rather that our access is via sensory systems that
radically simplify, and probably in no way resemble,
that real world. There is access, just no resemblance.
Similarly, when this objection speaks of the physical
world, it presumably assumes a physicalist ontology, with physical objects and properties that are
observer-independent. If so, MUI theory and conscious realism together do not claim that our sensory
worlds are built to be a useful schema of the physical
world, for they reject the ontology of physicalism.
If there is no observer-independent physical world,
then there is no reason to build schemas of it. MUI theory asserts, instead, that the physical world -- the world
of space-time, objects, matter, and so on -- is itself a
sensory user interface that is observer-dependent. This
might be counterintuitive to a physicalist, but it is not
logically self-contradictory. It can be made mathematically precise and is consistent with quantum theory.
With these provisos, we can now address the
main question of this objection, which is why criteria
of efficiency and usefulness should control the user
interface. The reason is that, according to conscious
realism, there is a reality independent of any particular
observer, and to interact intelligently or appropriately
with that reality, ones sensory perceptions must be a
useful and efficient guide to that reality. Conscious realism is not solipsism. There is a reality independent of
my perceptions, and my perceptions must be a useful
guide to that reality. This reality consists of dynamical
systems of conscious agents, not dynamical systems
of unconscious matter. Moreover, this reality is quite
complex. So, if my sensory systems are to be efficient,
they must dramatically simplify this complexity and yet
still provide a useful guide.
A third objection to MUI theory runs as follows:
Inexplicably, the table I see is created by my personal
user interface, but your table is created in a way that
is coherent with my own. An ironic reader would ask
whether they are using the same operating system. To
answer this, it is important to note that MUI theory does
not require that your user interface be functionally identical to mine. Evolutionary considerations suggest that
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.......................................................................................................
IRVA News
IRVA Announces Association with IONS
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My PEAR Experiment, continued from page 17
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will?
I suppose I could have told Angela Thompson Smith
that I could not attend the SSE conference, but I did not!
*The CRV protocols consist of the following basic
stages: I: Major Gestalts; 2: Sensory Contact; 3: Di-
___________________________________________
William F. Higgins is a member of the IRVA Board of
Directors and a long-time explorer in
the field of anomalous cognition. He
is a retired U.S. Navy captain and former FBI agent whose military career
included service in Korea and active
duty in the first Gulf War. Higginss
interest in psi and human consciousness studies began during his years at the U.S. Naval
Academy and led to his involvement with and support
of the PEAR Laboratory at Princeton and the Rhine
Research Center, as well as his personal work with
remote viewing.
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ON THE LIGHTER SIDE
by James Channon
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remote viewing.
Welcome now to a new era for Apeture -- it has just
gotten better. You are reading this in the first ever electronic edition of IRVAs flagship publication. This new
format offers many advantages. Among them: we can
now publish in full color, which previously would have
been too costly. This dramatically reduces publishing
expenses, allowing us to keep annual dues as low as
possible. It also cuts down significantly on mailing time
and costs, and it is environmentally responsible. But
never fear -- if you are among those who treasure the
feel of paper, and the permanence of a hard-copy in
your hands, you can purchase your own full-color issue
(at cost) through MagCloud.*
Even more exciting, you can now use this first
electronic issue to reach out to your friends, family, or
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Community Benefits:
Warcollier Prize for RV Research
www.irva.org/news/warcollier.html
ABOUT IRVA
The International Remote Viewing semination of accurate informa- ate. IRVA has made progress on
Association (IRVA) was organized tion about remote viewing. This some of these goals, but others
on March 18, 1999 in Alamogordo, goal is accomplished through a will take more time to realize. We
New Mexico, by scientists and robust website, regular confer- encourage all who are interested
academicians involved in remote ences, and speaking and educa- in bringing them about to join us
viewing since its beginning, tional outreach by its directors. in our efforts.
together with veterans of the Other IRVA goals are to assist in
IRVA neither endorses nor promilitary remote-viewing program forming objective testing stan- motes any specific method or
who are now active as trainers dards and materials for evaluating approach to remote viewing, but
and practitioners in the field. IRVA remote viewers, serve as a clear- aims to become a responsible
was formed in response to wide- inghouse for accurate information voice in the future development of
spread confusion and conflicting about the phenomenon, promote all aspects of the discipline.
claims about the remote-viewing rigorous theoretical research and
phenomenon.
applications development in the
One primary goal of the orga- remote-viewing field, and propose
nization is to encourage the dis- ethical standards as appropri28
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